Planet Earth Adventures

Planet Earth Adventures is the story of a man named Krakken and his best friend, Chris P. Critter, the millionaire inventor of The Simpleton. Krakken has several utterly useless college degrees. He is also the father of a strange and precocious toddler named Camadan, whom he adopted after a chance meeting with a girl. (“Some guys get herpes from a one night stand. I got a baby.”) Chris is impulsive and hyperactive and more than a little crazy, and he hires Krakken as payback for helping graduate high school.

Chris is on a mission to find a new form of “alt power”, an energy type that he believes will make him a billionaire. He enlists his friend Krakken to go and search for this new form of energy in a vehicle called The Angry Dwarf, using a new invention called The Knows. After several chance encounters with some truly odd and often infuriating people, the two friends finally discover an enormous source of alt power. But in short order, they discover a shocking truth: the energy signature they have found is caused by an alien spacecraft that crash landed on Earth many years ago.

The ship was piloted by the survivors of a planet wide civil war, on a world dominated by a race of hyper-evolved dogs. It was meant to be a rescue ship searching for refugees who had fled their planet, but their rescue failed. Not only did they crash, a new civil war broke out on the ship, an uprising led by a traitor who called himself Master Cannis. He was defeated, but wrecked the rescue ship, and killed many of its people. Chris, Krakken and Camadan stay aboard their ship to help make repairs.

Planet Earth Adventures is unlike the usual sort of science fiction. There's no alien invasion, no vast interstellar conflict where the “good guys” are just some folks who happen to be very good at killing “the bad guys”. The aliens are furry and warm blooded, not green or cold or reptilian. They are also – with one exception – not the least bit interested in conquering the Earth. All they want to do is gather up their people and go home.

Additionally, the book is about ideas, and questions. Some are technical, such as "why can't we stop traffic jams by somehow getting the fast drivers in front of the slow ones?" or "why do we grow trees just to cut them into pieces, then nail the pieces back together to make a house?" Others are more philosophical, such as "what does it mean to be a family?" or "are aliens racist?" Still others are critical: "why are we trying to find aliens when we can't stand the sight of other people?"

Most important of all, Planet Earth Adventures is about hope. Most of the aliens are either friendly or at least tolerant. They have survived a genocidal conflict and managed to rebuild their home world. This gives us hope that we too will survive whatever happens in the years ahead.